Ruby - How to store and load ENV variables in dev

It is very common to use an env variable in ours projects, specialy when we are using Docker or Heroku. In this case several configurations will be done using ENV vars.

Also we want to use that without so much work in our development enviroment.

We could create some script in shell setting all this variables to us and use this script to start our application

export FACEBOOK_APP_ID="<FACEBOOK_APP_ID>"
export FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET="<FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET>"
export GOOGLE_APP_ID="<GOOGLE_APP_ID>"
export GOOGLE_APP_SECRET="<GOOGLE_APP_SECRET>"

bundle exec rails server

Or you can use the dotenv, a very simple and cool gem that does this work for you.

To use it follow the instructions in https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv, create you .env with all env variables needed in development and just execute your project using bundle.

The .env file would be very simple

FACEBOOK_APP_ID="<FACEBOOK_APP_ID>"
FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET="<FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET>"
GOOGLE_APP_ID="<GOOGLE_APP_ID>"
GOOGLE_APP_SECRET="<GOOGLE_APP_SECRET>"

Just dont forget to add .env in your .gitignore to avoid commit credentials or other critical informations in your git repository.

echo ".env" >> .gitignore

You should only add a .env.example without any information as an example of what should be configured.

References

• Dotenv: dotenv.